The Art of Law in Shakespeare focuses on the mutual development of imagery, language, and tropes used in the early modern English drama and in the common law, primarily during the reign of King James I. The book uses law—in its rhetorical formation and written explorations—and drama as mutually influencing, and so each chapter examines a key topic that has relevance to both an area of common law (often a specific case, event, or legal writing is discussed) and a Shakespeare play (Love's Labour's Lost, Macbeth, The Winter's Tale, Cymbeline, and The Tempest). Rather than only zero in on the explicitly legal moments in a play—like trials, prison scenes, or portrayals of individual lawyers—Raffield's approach is often more global, which sets this book apart from previous scholarship. The book highlights the writings of Elizabethan and Jacobean legal thinkers—most notably Sir John Fortescue, Sir John Davies, and Sir Edward Coke—and brings in a range of diverse legal treatises, individual judgments, parliamentary decisions, and other forms of common law's expansive language. The wide net that Raffield casts—he also includes poetry, non-Shakespearean dramas, satires, James I's writings, Elizabethan portraiture, travel narratives, and political texts in his analysis—is one of the book's strengths, although at times the reader also may wish for more explicit connections between the sections of each chapter.

The multi-part approach is well evidenced in the first chapter, which is also the only one with an Elizabethan focus. It explores how education in common law drew on technical approaches in rhetoric manuals, developed its own specialized languages and forms, and invited satire in that self-production (as in John Marston's Histrio-Mastix). The chapter then zeroes in on Sir John Davies's satiric epigrams and the poetical Nosce Teipsum to examine a lawyer working in a literary way and his targeting of “legal technocrats” (43). Finally, the chapter builds to a discussion of Shakespeare's Love's Labour's Lost, in which Raffield highlights the play's simultaneous reliance on, and satire of, formal processes of law and technical rhetoric. The analysis rewards the reader when it comes full circle to compare the cloistered world of academe in the play and the Inns of Court, and to deliver a final questioning of legal rhetoric as merely empty tricks.

The following chapters are Jacobean focused, but they offer a similar multi-part approach. Raffield's knowledge and facility with legal matters—whether individual cases, treatises, reports, or accounts of the Inns—stands out in this book, with compelling and detailed analyses of the rhetorical, artistic, legal, and philosophical elements at work in his examples. One of the most interesting and interconnected discussions in the book presses on the relationship between natural law and common law, and examines a corollary body of natural images, ideas, and concepts in drama. This approach leads to an especially insightful take on The Winter's Tale, which Raffield notes has an explicit trial scene but that far more subtly intertwines the language of natural law and horticulture in its larger story. The chapter compares how legal theorists and jurists like Fortescue and Coke cultivated antique philosophy, natural law, and common law together in their writing as they linked law's search for truth, the affirmation of God's law, and the assertion of legal ethics. Raffield especially calls on Coke's writing in the case of Sharington v. Strotton (about inheritance and generations), and then moves to more general deliberations on the language of grafting and nature. In the process, he brings in Fortescue's De Laudibus Legum Angliae and Puttenamn's Art of Poesie. The chapter is especially interesting and well connected, although its final section on portraiture feels somewhat attenuated.

Raffield's other chapters likewise look at Jacobean plays—Macbeth, Cymbeline, and The Tempest—as they draw on major legal themes: treason, trial, and sovereignty; defining nationhood and the constructed image of Britain and of empire; and colonialization, oppression, and civic rebellion in the New World. These chapters (and the book in general) provide interesting takes on Shakespeare, although the analysis of legal texts and other matter often outshines the more familiar material. The final chapter especially illustrates the expansiveness of the book and its erudition, as well as the difficulty of Raffield's simultaneously micro and macro levels of analysis. Overall, the discussions are worth the work required of the reader, and the extended treatment of the legal cases, and especially Sir Edward Coke's writings, are valuable.